kinesthetic, prescientific, lived-bodily experience and cognition of the world—the unification. And as James

(1911) reminds us,

The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience. Here alone do we acquaint ourselves

with continuity, or the immersion of one thing in another, here alone with the self, with substance, with qualities, with activities in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, with tendency, and with freedom. (p. 97)

Perception, the critical bridge between the cognizing individual and their environment, includes other

individuals in one’s environment, indispensable to our ability to navigate and meet our needs in the world.

Amongst the many crucial processes that cognition entails, two of particular interest are memory and foresight.

In one sense this is exactly what learning is about, but in our species, it goes much further. It is interesting that

much of the neural basis of both memory and foresight—past and future—is shared in the brain (Schacter &

Addis, 2007). Awareness of such a connection, played out in practice, could guide a teacher seeking student

engagement with content. For example, both memory and creativity would be engaged when asking students

where knowledge of some aspect of course content could lead in the future.

Consciousness is sometimes viewed as the inevitable consequences of our complexity or an unexpected

irreducible emergent quality that could never have been predicted on the basis of a perfect knowledge of its

subordinate processes. There is an abundance of reasonable paths within cognition which can compete as well

as cooperate with each other to evoke an optimal response. Although at its best all processes function well

together, there are nevertheless multiple functions, which, like all other traits described earlier, have each their

own developmental and evolutionary histories. This is a principal contribution to our uniqueness.

The expressions of consciousness at different levels—from coma to the fullest measure of attention and

thought—are tuned by intimate relations with the environment. Consciousness is often regarded as the most

complex of human attributes, possibly emergent from cognition at its most complex. It is the embodiment of

these processes that occupies many phenomenologists, and past and anticipated work of several highly

productive research groups in cognitive neuroscience is gradually leading to a rapprochement between the fields.

“Meaning is more than words and deeper than concepts” (p. 1). The central thesis of Johnson’s book is consistent

with our operating assumptions about cognition. And they bring another dimension to this idea: not only is “what

we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process.” Johnson (2007)

goes on to emphasize that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic [emphasis added] dimensions of this embodied activity. Chief among those aesthetic dimensions are qualities, images, patterns of sensorimotor processes, and emotions. . . . Coming to grips with your embodiment is one of the most profound philosophical tasks you will ever face. (p. 1)

And in pursuit of meaning we are presented with another optimality—cost versus benefit—problem, familiar

to ecologists and economists (see below). But given the pleasures of participating in this book, the price is not

so high. Eager for insights and pleased by surprise, we have observed (with Wilson & Foglia, 2017) that

“Sometimes the nature of the dependence of cognition on the body is quite unexpected and suggests new ways

of conceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitive processing” (paragraph 2, online).

All connectedness at every level of biological organization exists by virtue of its communications within and

between levels. Ultimately communication between organisms (as in the cultivation of intersubjectivity) occurs

where the quality of communications is arguably more precise when organisms share aspects of their lifeworlds.

And while never complete, we might expect that the quality of communications is precise to that extent. A

phenomenological investigation that builds on first-person reports is only possible to the extent that we can

Integrating the biological perspectives makes us mindful that every definable behavioral event or pattern occurs

at the intersection of development, ecology, evolution, and physiology. A crossroads of time and space in which,

for the purposes of study, phenomena, dynamic as they are, are necessarily seen as though static, frozen like a

photograph. Like time and space, while intuitively obvious, these phenomena are at best inferred from patterns

of perception of phenomena (Buzsáki & Llinás, 2017). In resonance with our intersection metaphor is Friesen,

Henriksson, and Saevi’s (2012) suggestion for conceptualizing the critical shared experience aspect of phenomenological research. It is to “understand the life-world experience as extending or unfolding along four axes, dimensions or ‘existentials’”: lived space, lived time, lived body, lived relation (p. 43).

If we can visualize our biological traditions as four objective lenses on our microscope, each reveals something

about the individual at a different level of organization and with differing degrees of resolution. At each

magnification, fine focus can be sought by means of the process akin to the phenomenologist’s collaborative

hermeneutic circle.

After briefly characterizing the DEEP disciplines and identifying phenomenological constructs that resonate

with them, we will also identify several themes at traverse levels of organization. These themes include the

importance of pure description, the integration of “inner” and “outer” influences on behavior, and constraints on

behavior.

Development

Development refers to both programs of change encoded in the genes inherited from the previous generation(s)

as well as those attributable to individual experiences within one’s lifespan. In recent years the field of genetics

has given rise to epigenetics, providing dramatic new insights into how the environment can activate or suppress

genetic activity, often in ways that can be transmitted across generations(Allis & Jenuwein, 2016). Thus, genes

that unfold their program in a relatively fixed manner are complemented by changes that occur in a relatively

For our purposes, the effect of stress on cognition is the most salient. Cognition is a complex protean concept

as it has developed in scholarship over the generations, but its irreducible core has traditionally consisted of the

processes of the nervous system involved in acquiring information from the environment (by means of senses

and perception), storing it (several forms of memory), and acting as influenced by this information. Coping with

change includes an extraordinary ability for error detection, mentioned earlier. This trait enables a crucial self correcting mechanism for action that occurs in slightly different form at every level of organization.

The processes of cognition act in exquisite balance to address our real or perceived biological needs. That

balance is highly sensitive to stress and can be reconfigured to help one cope. The expression of this response is

evoked in modest or dramatic degree—by experiences ranging from an unexpected threat to life through a raised

eyebrow, flushed cheek, or awareness that someone is staring at you. Any of these can reconfigure cognitive